at least in its current form
So, you know, um.
Reading the news and social media, lately, I keep thinking about Sylvia Plath’s poem to her father, the man she described as an engine sending her to the death camps (and “The vampire who said he was you/And drank my blood for a year”). Sylvia Plath stuck her head in an oven, so this is maybe not a great cognitive-emotional model to emulate.
The cycle seems to have become this, all day and every day:
We’re going to make some different policy
OH GOD YOU’RE EXTERMINATING ME TO DEATH IN YOUR DEATH CAMP TORTURE CHAMBERS OF TERRIFYING SLAUGHTER
The reactions are all layups:
Remember the last thing I posted: A news story in Politico said that the US Forest Service was being consumed in waves of desperate fear and rage as Donald Trump tears down the federal government’s ability to fight wildfires. So I drove up into the mountains and went to Forest Service fire stations, where firefighters said that their staffing levels are fine, but the new administration’s policy course is still unclear and seemingly chaotic and it’s making people frustrated. A little kernel of perfectly reasonable criticism, packaged in explosively emotional framing with ludicrous